Simple PHP ASCII Art Generator

Comments:: 5

Tags:: Shell Scripting; PHP; Imaging; Code Snippet

By Jesse Donat on: Nov. 10, 2011

So yesterday I was bored and asked my friend what I should do. She replied "I don't know, draw ASCII art or something!" and sitting there with the terminal open I kind of wondered what it would take to write one of those image to ASCII scripts.

20 minutes later I had the following PHP Shell Script! It works by simply sampling the saturation of every Xth pixel and mapping that saturation to a character from an array. There is no nearest-neighboring or anything like that, just straight up sampling.

Huzzah!

And there you have it! A whopping 35 lines of code. There is a ton of tweaking you can do like changing the array of characters, or adjusting the $scale variable which is simply how wide of a sample it makes. Setting it to 1 for instance should sample every pixel on the Y and every other pixel on the X (so it scales properly). To the right is a sample output of the script.

Try it for yourself!

The script accepts local or remote image paths as the first argument. The following is a simple usage example you can use to get you started.

./ascii.php "https://donatstudios.com/images/site/JesseDonat.jpg"

It was a fun little project and I look forward to seeing if/what the internet comes up with for it. Fork me on Github, or post links in the comments! Happy hacking!